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Saved as through Fire: A Thomistic Account of Purgatory, Temporal Punishment, and Satisfaction
In contemporary considerations of purgatory, there is increasing ecumenical agreement among Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants about the need for spiritual purification and healing before a soul can enter into the glory of God's presence in heaven. Yet for the broader tradition of the Church, this account of what souls require from God is paired with a complementary account of what God, in his justice, requires of the soul, including satisfaction of its "debt of punishment" (reatus poenae).
Although the transformative and retributive aspects of purgatory are often seen today as being at odds with one another, Fr. Luke Wilgenbusch proposes in Saved as through Fire to recover their proper and traditional harmony. Taking Thomas Aquinas as his primary guide, Wilgenbusch identifies and explores the full array of the consequences of sin—both immanent and extrinsic—that purgatory resolves.
Through an attentive retrieval of Aquinas's teaching on sin, its effects, and its remedy in Christ, Wilgenbusch clarifies how purgatory indeed heals and purifies souls from their guilt and disordered attachments, and how it simultaneously serves as a form of punishment and a means of satisfaction, enabling souls to contribute, in union with Christ, to the restoration of the divine order of creation damaged by their sin. Beyond shedding valuable light on the doctrine of purgatory, the integrated vantage on purification, punishment, and satisfaction provided by Saved as through Fire holds promise, too, for a better understanding of the Church's practices of penance, reparation, and the offering of indulgences.
Although the transformative and retributive aspects of purgatory are often seen today as being at odds with one another, Fr. Luke Wilgenbusch proposes in Saved as through Fire to recover their proper and traditional harmony. Taking Thomas Aquinas as his primary guide, Wilgenbusch identifies and explores the full array of the consequences of sin—both immanent and extrinsic—that purgatory resolves.
Through an attentive retrieval of Aquinas's teaching on sin, its effects, and its remedy in Christ, Wilgenbusch clarifies how purgatory indeed heals and purifies souls from their guilt and disordered attachments, and how it simultaneously serves as a form of punishment and a means of satisfaction, enabling souls to contribute, in union with Christ, to the restoration of the divine order of creation damaged by their sin. Beyond shedding valuable light on the doctrine of purgatory, the integrated vantage on purification, punishment, and satisfaction provided by Saved as through Fire holds promise, too, for a better understanding of the Church's practices of penance, reparation, and the offering of indulgences.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published October 20, 2023
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August 1, 2026
I really liked this book more than I even thought I would: I felt that I came away from it finding genuine solutions to some logical quandaries around the concept of purgatory.
There are essentially two main "models" of purgatory, one more coherent in a Catholic system (satisfaction model) and the other in some Protestant and modern Orthodox circles (sanctification model):
Sanctification model: purgatory exists as an extension of sanctification in which the soul gradually must be free of all attachments to sin before he can enter heaven. This version is popularized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce and also in his letters: "our souls demand purgatory..."
Satisfaction model: purgatory exists as an intermediate state in which the soul is punished and makes satisfaction passively (satispassio) to make full restitution for the temporal effects of his sin. In the Catholic understanding, a person can go to purgatory for three reasons: (1) unforgiven venial sins (a person not receiving freedom from them in confession or through the Eucharist, general absolution, etc.), (2) evil dispositions/attachments (like someone still addicted to a certain sinful desire at death), (3) temporal punishments not atoned for (a person not doing penance after forgiveness, like a kid being forgiven for breaking the window but not doing the work of fixing the window after the fact). Interestingly, a person can go to purgatory for all three reasons, but NEVER only for the second reason.
In this book, Fr. Wilgenbusch takes the logic from multiple texts of Aquinas to say that purgatory is BOTH about satisfaction of justice and about the healing of the soul (sanctification), though purgatory's primary aim is satisfaction of temporal punishments due to sin. The holy souls in purgatory are sanctified through their satisfaction because they are inflamed by charity: the hearts are oriented toward God as their final end and they desire to "make it up to God" just as a loving person desires to make up for the wrongs he has done for his neighbor. It is, as Pope Benedict XVI said in Spe Salvi, "the pain of love." Through this process of satisfaction, their past choices are made plain, sorrow for them becomes more profound, and their vision of God becomes clearer and clearer.
So, Wilgenbusch's thesis is something I have always been sympathetic to: my way of thinking about it is similar to Lewis' analogy of purgatory being the "front porch" before a dirty child goes into the house: he wants to be clean before he goes to see his father. In my own life, I remember being told by my grandmother that if I rolled around in the dirt, I would get sprayed before I got to go back into her house. In this sense, her words captured both a satisfaction and sanctification model: the pain and nuisance of being sprayed was a punishment against my will (satisfaction), yet the water cleansed my body and made me fit to enter the house (sanctification).
If this is true, however, a challenging question that I had struggled to answer was: if, according to revealed dogma, a person goes directly to Heaven if he were to die immediately after baptism, which forgives all sins and their temporal punishments, why would he go directly to heaven with these bad habits still firmly fixed in place? Take the same situation with an evangelical Protestant framework (if one, like Lewis, is sympathetic to sanctifying purgatory): why does the thief on the cross go directly to Heaven after his martyrdom while still likely being attached to a lifetime of evil dispositions? Is it just because Jesus said so? Seems ad hoc.
Here is where I found the genius of this book's approach: Conversions/debates around the satisfaction vs. sanctification model often overlook a key event in the afterlife: the particular judgement. When a soul is forgiven of all sins and has made satisfaction for all of their temporal punishments, he will go directly to heaven even with evil habits/attachments remaining in his soul. Why? Because at the particular judgement, which every person will experience after death regardless of their final destination, the encounter with Jesus Christ will act on the soul which is now separated from its body/sense faculties/temptations to sin: once the soul in the state of grace sees Christ whom he has oriented his life towards, he will make an unfettered choice to accept him and this choice will be so powerful that any evil habit/disposition once possessed with his life in the body will be annihilated. In this sense, I think Catholics and many Protestants can agree on this point: that temptations and bad habits are destroyed at the particular judgement. Wilgenbusch states:
"In light of such a difficulty, it seems much more reasonable to posit not one but two modes of rectification for the separated soul, one which begins the transformation and one which perfects it. This theory has many advantages. First, it allows us to preserve the insights of both of these great theologians. Bellarmine and Suarez both present convincing and yet imperfect accounts of the soul’s transformation. When combined, a fuller picture emerges. At the moment of the particular judgment the soul’s profound act of love begins to iron out the residual evil dispositions that remain latent in the soul. It may happen, however, that more remains than can be removed by a single act, strong though it may be. Only later, upon the soul’s entrance into heaven, is the soul crowned with the ultimate perfection, which even an infinite series of acts could not grant it..." (67).
In other words, both purgatory AND the particular judgement are purifying: if a person has bad habits/attachments and temporal punishments not satisfied for, he will receive clear vision of this and then lovingly make satisfaction in purgatory. If a soul ONLY has attachments to sin, he will be purified of these dispositions in his dramatic encounter with Christ in the particular judgement.
Finally, I think Benedict XVI's words on the particular judgement in Spe Salvi are helpful and beautiful:
"(Paragraph 47) “Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire.” But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate,” or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1)."
There are essentially two main "models" of purgatory, one more coherent in a Catholic system (satisfaction model) and the other in some Protestant and modern Orthodox circles (sanctification model):
Sanctification model: purgatory exists as an extension of sanctification in which the soul gradually must be free of all attachments to sin before he can enter heaven. This version is popularized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce and also in his letters: "our souls demand purgatory..."
Satisfaction model: purgatory exists as an intermediate state in which the soul is punished and makes satisfaction passively (satispassio) to make full restitution for the temporal effects of his sin. In the Catholic understanding, a person can go to purgatory for three reasons: (1) unforgiven venial sins (a person not receiving freedom from them in confession or through the Eucharist, general absolution, etc.), (2) evil dispositions/attachments (like someone still addicted to a certain sinful desire at death), (3) temporal punishments not atoned for (a person not doing penance after forgiveness, like a kid being forgiven for breaking the window but not doing the work of fixing the window after the fact). Interestingly, a person can go to purgatory for all three reasons, but NEVER only for the second reason.
In this book, Fr. Wilgenbusch takes the logic from multiple texts of Aquinas to say that purgatory is BOTH about satisfaction of justice and about the healing of the soul (sanctification), though purgatory's primary aim is satisfaction of temporal punishments due to sin. The holy souls in purgatory are sanctified through their satisfaction because they are inflamed by charity: the hearts are oriented toward God as their final end and they desire to "make it up to God" just as a loving person desires to make up for the wrongs he has done for his neighbor. It is, as Pope Benedict XVI said in Spe Salvi, "the pain of love." Through this process of satisfaction, their past choices are made plain, sorrow for them becomes more profound, and their vision of God becomes clearer and clearer.
So, Wilgenbusch's thesis is something I have always been sympathetic to: my way of thinking about it is similar to Lewis' analogy of purgatory being the "front porch" before a dirty child goes into the house: he wants to be clean before he goes to see his father. In my own life, I remember being told by my grandmother that if I rolled around in the dirt, I would get sprayed before I got to go back into her house. In this sense, her words captured both a satisfaction and sanctification model: the pain and nuisance of being sprayed was a punishment against my will (satisfaction), yet the water cleansed my body and made me fit to enter the house (sanctification).
If this is true, however, a challenging question that I had struggled to answer was: if, according to revealed dogma, a person goes directly to Heaven if he were to die immediately after baptism, which forgives all sins and their temporal punishments, why would he go directly to heaven with these bad habits still firmly fixed in place? Take the same situation with an evangelical Protestant framework (if one, like Lewis, is sympathetic to sanctifying purgatory): why does the thief on the cross go directly to Heaven after his martyrdom while still likely being attached to a lifetime of evil dispositions? Is it just because Jesus said so? Seems ad hoc.
Here is where I found the genius of this book's approach: Conversions/debates around the satisfaction vs. sanctification model often overlook a key event in the afterlife: the particular judgement. When a soul is forgiven of all sins and has made satisfaction for all of their temporal punishments, he will go directly to heaven even with evil habits/attachments remaining in his soul. Why? Because at the particular judgement, which every person will experience after death regardless of their final destination, the encounter with Jesus Christ will act on the soul which is now separated from its body/sense faculties/temptations to sin: once the soul in the state of grace sees Christ whom he has oriented his life towards, he will make an unfettered choice to accept him and this choice will be so powerful that any evil habit/disposition once possessed with his life in the body will be annihilated. In this sense, I think Catholics and many Protestants can agree on this point: that temptations and bad habits are destroyed at the particular judgement. Wilgenbusch states:
"In light of such a difficulty, it seems much more reasonable to posit not one but two modes of rectification for the separated soul, one which begins the transformation and one which perfects it. This theory has many advantages. First, it allows us to preserve the insights of both of these great theologians. Bellarmine and Suarez both present convincing and yet imperfect accounts of the soul’s transformation. When combined, a fuller picture emerges. At the moment of the particular judgment the soul’s profound act of love begins to iron out the residual evil dispositions that remain latent in the soul. It may happen, however, that more remains than can be removed by a single act, strong though it may be. Only later, upon the soul’s entrance into heaven, is the soul crowned with the ultimate perfection, which even an infinite series of acts could not grant it..." (67).
In other words, both purgatory AND the particular judgement are purifying: if a person has bad habits/attachments and temporal punishments not satisfied for, he will receive clear vision of this and then lovingly make satisfaction in purgatory. If a soul ONLY has attachments to sin, he will be purified of these dispositions in his dramatic encounter with Christ in the particular judgement.
Finally, I think Benedict XVI's words on the particular judgement in Spe Salvi are helpful and beautiful:
"(Paragraph 47) “Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire.” But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate,” or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1)."
November 23, 2024
This was an enjoyable, thorough work that answered my remaining questions after reading St. Robert Bellarmine's treatise on purgatory.
August 21, 2025
Fundamentally changed my understanding of temporal punishment! A dense but valuable read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews